By STEVE KRAUSE
Saturday, Jan. 16, dawned cold, but not exceptionally so. It was the morning after a hectic night at The Item thanks to an end-of-game fracas at a Saugus High basketball game that I — pulling double duty as acting sports editor — had to help track down after having put in a full day running the newsroom.
(Perhaps as an ominous portent of what would come later, Sachem coach Paul Moran was taken to the hospital with chest pains.)
There were fires to put out at work Saturday, too, due to an early-morning issue with the paper’s e-edition. By the time I finally got on the road toward Foxborough, and the 4:30 p.m. Patriots game I was looking forward to attending, it was well past noon — much later than I’d wanted to leave.
The game was uneventful. The Patriots beat the Chiefs easily yet unspectacularly. After the game, though, I began to feel chest pains.
Nothing new there. These pains had been with me since the previous winter, and I figured that between a more demanding job at The Item and the horrendous winter of 2015, I’d grown out of shape because I’d become lax on my exercise regimen.
Now, I confess to being an indifferent patient. I am diabetic and have spent a lot of time since being diagnosed in 2004 in denial of that reality. And I didn’t get around to getting a stress test to find out about these pains until the end of June, and it came back negative. When an abdominal ultrasound revealed gallstones, that became the operative explanation for the pains. I decided I wasn’t in any serious trouble.
But this nagged at me. The pains only surfaced during exertion, and particularly after meals. And they always traveled the same path — straight up my chest and into my jaw (but never down my arms).
They also were not improving. Walking the Marginal Way in Maine in October, I had to keep stopping. Raking leaves … scraping my windshield … these were all things I could not do comfortably — if at all.
A gallbladder scan in November came back clean. So, on Dec. 30, I saw cardiologist Dr. Lawrence Block, who told me that these were classic angina pains, but that treating them through a change in medication and diet would be an acceptable first step. He told me I needed to be a vegan. I tried. I tried!
But in Foxborough, walking to the interview room following the game, I got those pains again. I was disappointed because I thought the new meds had helped. And as the evening progressed, and I did more walking, they got worse — peaking while I exerted myself and subsiding when I stopped. Eventually they got so intense I was doubled over, trying to catch my breath.
Writer Mike Shalin, with whom I go back almost 40 years, sat next to me in the press box. He was concerned enough that he had his phone out and was looking around for someone who could help. But I’d already been carried out of one press box in my life (Boston College, 2001, for sepsis) and just didn’t need the reputation as The Guy Who Keeps Getting Hauled Out Of Press Boxes. Besides, I was sitting still and the pains were subsiding.
I told Mike I was OK, but decided then and there to pack up and go home. I saw a friend active on Facebook chat and, in panic, messaged her that I wasn’t feeling well. She told me to get to the ER … now!
I probably would have gone anyway, but it didn’t hurt to have the warning fresh in my mind as I called home to tell my wife that I wasn’t well.
Foolishly, I drove home from Foxborough, which meant another walk from the press box to the parking lot, more pain, and another five minutes standing with my hands on my knees.
When I got home, I found two angry family units — wife Linda and son Andrew — staring me down as if I’d walked in on an intervention. And even though it was, by this time, around 11 p.m. Saturday night, off to the Salem Hospital ER I went.
Here’s a bit of advice for anyone going to the ER: Chest pains put you at the top of the list.
I got to Salem somewhere close to 11:30 and had a bed, in the cardiac unit, by 3 a.m.
The angiogram Monday revealed three-vessel disease, which mean that three arteries were occluded. One of them, if a little more occluded, would have produced the type of heart attack known as “the widowmaker.” I’m sure you can figure out why.
Cardiologist Dr. David Roberts gave me the choice of controlling this with medication and diet.
“Isn’t this where we came in?” I asked him.
He answered affirmatively, but also told me it was impossible to sandblast me (you know, a stent) because the blockages were not very accessible. That left a bypass — the last thing I wanted to hear. But given a choice between that and another six months of angina pain, and possibly something even worse than that, bypass it was.
So what are the first two things an impending heart-bypass recipient thinks of: No. 1: Oh, ——, what have I done to myself now? No. 2: I don’t have a will (I will be forever thankful to Lynn Attorney Judith A. Wayne, a friend, who sprung into action, dropping everything to draw one up for me in time for my surgery).
Because I had a slow-acting blood thinner in my system, the surgeon didn’t want to operate until the following Friday to give the drug a chance to leave my system. I could have gone home, but it didn’t sound as if anyone connected with this — from the cardiologist to my wife and son — wanted to take the risk. So I stayed through the week.
That left three days of essentially being a hotel guest in the Salem Hospital cardiac surgical unit. I can’t say it was altogether unpleasant. Without exception, the staff was absolutely awesome, from the doctors to the physicians’ assistants to the techs to the nurses.
But Friday hung over me like the Sword of Damocles.
No occasion, no matter how dire, is without some humor. On one of the whiteboards in my room was a space for “What do you prefer to be called?” My brother-in-law and I traded barbs over that until we came up with “Lotus Blossom.” And that’s all it took. From then on, I was “Lotus Blossom” to the nurses. It helped to have something to laugh about.
Friday, Jan. 22, came, finally, and the surgical staff, under the direction of Dr. Ann Toran, began to prep me. And these people didn’t fool around. In no time, the good drugs pulsed through me. I felt neither pain nor concern. I was wheeled into the operating room, had a mask put onto my face, and was told to take deep breaths.
Next thing I knew, I heard the sound of nurse Michelle St. Pierre telling me, “You’re back in your room, Stephen. You made it!” I had been under anesthesia for 6½ hours.
Over the next few days, as my condition improved, more and more tubes were extracted from my body. And all I could think of was that if taking these things out hurt this badly, thank God I wasn’t awake when they were put in.
In a bypass, surgeons saw through your breastbone, deflate your lungs, cool your heart with some kind of salt-water solution, clamp off arteries, and cut into your leg to find two veins; and into the pleural cavity of your chest for the third one. Then, they bypass the diseased part of the artery by grafting the leg/chest veins and arteries to healthy vessels en route to restoring full blood flow to the heart.
All I can relate it to is the Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz” after being attacked by the flying monkeys: “They took my legs, and put them over there. They took my chest and put it over here …”
I also learned some medical jargon. I am not an easy person from which to draw blood. Inserting IV lines is also tough. Or, as Dr. Roberts said, “he’s a tough stick.” Fascinating lingo. Also, the whole bypass procedure is called Cabbage, which I thought very odd. But it’s medical shorthand for CABG — Coronary Artery Bypass Graft. My procedure was CABG x 3.
I have to say here I had plenty of company from friends and co-workers, both before and after the surgery, and I thank them all profusely — especially my Class of 1971 St. John’s Prep peeps who came up Manute Bol tall. Also, emotions swing wildly in the days and weeks following this surgery, but the closest I came to actually crying was when our CEO, Beth Bresnahan, told my son Andrew on Facebook that when the staff was told that I was out of surgery and that things had gone well, a collective cheer went up. It was at a point where I really needed something to hang onto.
I was released Jan. 28, sent home with a hug-pillow in the shape of a heart (it protects your chest and the recently-broken breastbone) that Linda nicknamed “Wilson” after the volleyball in “Cast Away.” One month later, I’ve reached the point where I walk every day and feel less and less nervous about pushing myself. There have been a couple of times where my walking output far exceeded my expectations — which is so encouraging considering I couldn’t walk up the street without angina for most of last year.
One very strong admonition: I am not cured. All this operation did was reroute plumbing (thankfully I never actually had a heart attack). It did not address the issues of how the pipes got all clogged up. That is up to me, with the help of my new best friends: Drs. Toran (and her excellent surgical team), Block, and Peter Barker; and the Union Hospital cardiac rehabilitation team. Mostly, though, it’s up to me.
Concessions need to be made, and reducing stress is one of them. I am 62 years old and coming off the most major of surgeries. The offer was made to me by our publisher to step away from the stress-filled duties of running the Item newsroom and return to the job I loved for 16 years: sports editor. I have accepted and look forward eagerly to doing the job once I’m back to work (hopefully by early March).
Dr. Barker calls this one of the miracles of modern medicine, both in what was done, and how fast I rebounded. But it’s a cautionary tale. My heart may have been in my surgeon’s hands, but the rest of my life is in mine.
I will do my best not to drop it.